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There’s been some Dragon Award progress

After my last post about the Dragon Award website, I sent the gist of the post as an email to the email addresses I had for the awards. I’ve not had a reply and it may be a coincidence but some of the issues have been fixed:

The register vote button now works and allows you to register to vote (note that’s for the second stage of voting – it’s not the nomination page).

Getting to the nomination page is still circuitous. Find the 2017 “Nominations are now live” news post and that has a link to this year’s nomination page. They’ve also fixed the first sentence which now says “Welcome to the annual Dragon Awards” instead of “Welcome to the third annual Dragon Awards”. The register to vote page still has the old sentence though.

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27 thoughts on “There’s been some Dragon Award progress”

Doesn’t this link to the Dragon Con 2019 – Dragon Awards Nominations link work? It says the deadline is July 20, 2019, and it seems to let you both register and nominate. But the eligibility window doesn’t close until the end of June, right?

I still wonder if the issues are just incompetence or if they’re deliberately trying to suppress the vote. That seems unlikely because, as Kat points out, they could just make all the numbers up if they wanted to.

It looks like somebody simply not having the time. I suspect the ‘rules’ has to go through Dragon Con’s legal advisor even though they don’t change much – that would explain a lot of the delays as it would require some effort to make that happen. Mind you, the things that WERE active probably shouldn’t have been if the organisers were waiting for a rubber stamp on the rules

Oh, come on — if the rules had to go through a lawyer, they wouldn’t have boilerplate sweepstakes verbiage ripped off from a thousand other websites as their Terms & Conditions. There’s never been a lawyer involved in this.

I think it’s kind of a combo. Again, they walk a fine line. We know that they do use the votes as guidelines, even deciding factors for what they do. And they do want the Dragons to be seen as legitimate, valuable awards — and also have to gradually make them that way so as not to annoy DragonCon. They need to show progress, and since it’s a popular vote award, that means gathering more votes (more popularity,) even though they decide who actually gets the nods. So voting efforts aren’t wasted, just limited in impact. The Dragons’ efforts to publicize the awards are what attracted the Kindle Unlimited crowd.

At the same time, they know perfectly well that DragonCon attendees — still the ones most interested in voting for it outside the Puppies — are younger, diverse, liberal and likely to ask a lot of questions if they pay attention to the Dragons. So making the votes last minute by not organizing the site, making it hard to register and vote, etc. gives them a bit of breathing room. The Red Panda Faction breathing down their neck is pressure against that.

The main idea of the Dragons was to create an award that could easily be handed to right wing and right wing approved authors as a publicity selling tool. But it’s a set of awards attached to a giant multi-media con. Even though the con makes a habit of not paying much attention to these little groups and events it sponsors, that still has an effect. They want attention for the Dragons, which DragonCon afforded them, but the more attention they get, the less oblique they can be and the less they have a right wing clubhouse. (Again, setting up a conservative themed convention with its own set of awards would have given the Puppies what they really wanted, but that’s a much bigger undertaking.)

In only the second year, the award runners, despite being able to decide the winners and noms as desired, started partly abandoning their Puppy pals and begged John Scalzi and N.K. Jemisin — whom the Puppies had conspiracized into their greatest, thieving foes (because Beale hates them and set it up that way,) — to not withdraw their nominations. (Scalzi stayed in because they agreed to let authors withdraw if they wanted without a fuss; N.K. Jemisin did not, though they still tried to use her name for publicity.) In only the third year, the Puppies and Puppy-loved authors have lost quite a bit of ground, though they have their showings in the SF and Fantasy awards. In the two comics-based awards, they don’t seem to have much sway even in the first year, and even less influence in the two media awards.

There are four gaming awards — more than half of the number of book awards. I won’t be surprised if the number of the gaming awards increases over the years, since DragonCon is much more of a gaming and multimedia con than it is a book or comics con. And there is very limited impact that the Puppies, any faction, can have on those awards, especially the electric games ones. They had them primarily I’m guessing to attract those GamerGiggler voters who helped them out with their Hugo voting slates and because a few Puppies like LC are trying to do stuff in games.

So they had a wedge and it’s much smaller now, even though the award runners are their pals and can decide who gets nominations and awards. That was way faster a shift than I was expecting back when the Dragons were first announced. So now more people are becoming more disposed towards the Dragons, which the award runners definitely want, but which is also going to put more pressure on running the awards and award site more competently and clearly. So the Red Panda Faction and others may want to spend part of this year and next year bothering DragonCon staff about the disorganization and poor operation of the Dragon awards — the con’s brand name — and again suggesting the award runners be replaced. DragonCon will not want to replace them — too much work — but they will if it becomes a big enough annoyance and at the least, they will put pressure on the current runners to clean things up. The more pressure, the closer the awards get to legitimacy instead of a rigged sweepstakes run as a private fiefdom.

Of course, if that happens, it’s less fun for Camestros, but you can’t have everything.

I have no idea why the puppies didn’t just create a set of awards and attached them to a rightwing friendly con such as LibertyCon, ConCarolinas or LTUE. But I guess they wanted to tap into the prestige of DragonCon, especially since they had built up DragonCon as a model for everything a con should be as opposed to WorldCon.

Yes, I think the thinking, from what y’all have quoted from them, is that they needed a big multi-media convention that wasn’t book centered. But that always meant that influence they would have would have a time limit. And it’s looking more and more like the Kindle folk are more effective.